Drip Campaigns for Ecommerce: How They Map to Klaviyo Flows

A drip campaign is a series of automated emails released on a schedule after someone does something: joins your list, leaves a cart, places an order. Every ecommerce store runs drips, whether it calls them that or not. In Klaviyo, they are called flows, and the difference between a drip that earns and a drip that just sends is almost always in the trigger, the timing and the exit logic.

This guide covers what a drip campaign is, the drips an ecommerce brand actually needs, how many emails to put in each, and exactly how each one maps to a Klaviyo flow.

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What is a drip campaign?

A drip campaign is a pre-written sequence of automated emails (or SMS) sent to one person at a time, triggered by an action they take, with each message released after a set delay. Instead of one big broadcast, the customer gets information in small, timed doses that match where they are: new subscriber, cart abandoner, first-time buyer, lapsed customer.

Three components make up every drip:

1. A trigger. The event that starts the sequence: a subscription, a checkout started, an order placed, a date.
2. A sequence. The emails themselves, written in advance.
3. A schedule. The delays between messages: one hour, one day, five days.

The better drips add a fourth: exit conditions. Someone who buys halfway through an abandoned cart drip should stop receiving “you left something behind” emails. That one rule separates a drip that feels helpful from one that feels like a robot.

What does DRIP stand for?

Nothing, strictly. The name comes from drip irrigation: water released slowly so the plant absorbs it rather than being flooded. You will see the backronym “Deliver Relevant Information to Prospects”, which captures the idea well enough. The point is that the customer receives the right information gradually, at the moment it is useful.

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Drip campaign vs flow vs nurture vs newsletter

These terms get used interchangeably, which causes confusion when you are briefing a team or an agency. Here is how they actually differ.

Term	What it is	Triggered by	Personalised?
Drip campaign	Fixed sequence on a fixed schedule	A single action or list join	Lightly (name, product)
Nurture campaign	Sequence that adapts to behaviour	An action, then branches on clicks, purchases, data	Heavily
Klaviyo flow	The build: trigger + delays + splits + filters	List, segment, metric, date property, price drop or low inventory	As much as you engineer
Campaign / newsletter	One-off broadcast to a list or segment	You pressing send	By segment

In Klaviyo, a flow can be a pure drip (email, wait two days, email, wait three days, email) or a full nurture with conditional splits on purchase history and engagement. The best-performing ecommerce flows start as drips and become nurtures as you add branches. Klaviyo’s own help centre lists six trigger types for flows: added to list, added to segment, metric, date property, price drop and low inventory (as of September 2026).

A drip runs automatically for each person who qualifies. A campaign runs once for everyone in a segment. Both matter, but drips are where the compounding happens, because they keep working on every new subscriber and customer without anyone touching them.

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How a drip campaign works, in Klaviyo terms

Mapping the generic drip vocabulary onto the Klaviyo flow builder:

• Trigger → flow trigger. For a welcome drip, “Added to list”. For an abandoned cart drip, the metric “Checkout Started”. For post-purchase, “Placed Order” or “Fulfilled Order”. For a birthday drip, a date property.
• Trigger conditions → trigger filters. Narrow who enters using the event data. Example: only start the post-purchase drip when the order contains a specific product or collection.
• Schedule → time delays. Wait X hours or days, or wait until a specific day and time.
• Exit conditions → profile filters. Klaviyo checks profile filters when someone enters and again before every message. “Placed Order zero times since starting this flow” is the most important filter in ecommerce.
• Personalisation → conditional splits. Branch on whether someone is a first-time or repeat buyer, what they bought, their country, or whether they clicked the last email.
• Channel mix → SMS steps. Add an SMS branch for subscribers who have given SMS consent, usually for the highest-intent moment in the drip.

Get the filters right and a drip is self-cleaning. Get them wrong and it keeps selling to people who have already bought, which is how customers learn to ignore you.

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The ecommerce drip campaigns you need (and the Klaviyo flow for each)

Most drip campaign guides are written for SaaS: onboarding sequences, trial nurtures, webinar reminders. Ecommerce drips run on different data. Here is the full set, with the Klaviyo trigger for each.

Drip campaign	Klaviyo trigger	Emails	Typical length	Deep dive
Welcome series	Added to list	4–6	7–14 days	Welcome series framework
Abandoned cart	Checkout Started	2–3	24–72 hours	Abandoned cart strategy
Browse abandonment	Viewed Product	1–2	24–48 hours	Browse abandonment flow
Post-purchase	Placed Order / Fulfilled Order	3–5	2–4 weeks	Post-purchase flow guide
Review request	Delivery or fulfilment event	1–2	1–3 weeks after delivery	Review request emails
Replenishment	Placed Order + product-timed delay	1–3	Product lifespan	Replenishment email flow
Cross-sell	Placed Order or a predicted date	1–3	2–6 weeks	Cross-sell and upsell emails
Price drop / back in stock	Price drop / back-in-stock subscription	1–2	Event-driven	Price drop and back in stock flows
Birthday / anniversary	Date property / Placed Order	1–3	Around the date	Birthday email marketing
Win-back	Added to segment (lapsed)	2–3	2–4 weeks	Win-back flow guide
Sunset	Added to segment (unengaged)	2–3	1–3 weeks	Sunset flow

The first four are the revenue base. Review, replenishment and cross-sell drips are where repeat purchase is built. Win-back and sunset keep the list healthy enough that everything else reaches the inbox. For a visual walk-through of what good versions look like, see our Klaviyo flow examples.

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Three ecommerce drip campaign examples

Here is what a drip looks like on paper, email by email. These are structures, not scripts; your products and voice fill them in.

Example 1: Supplement welcome drip (6 emails, 12 days)

Send	Email	Job
Immediately	Welcome + offer delivery	Deliver the promised code, set expectations
Day 1	Founder story / why the formula exists	Build trust before asking again
Day 3	Ingredient and quality proof	Answer “is this legit?” (testing, sourcing, certifications)
Day 5	Best-seller routing	”Start here” by goal: sleep, energy, gut health
Day 8	Social proof	Reviews tied to specific goals
Day 12	Offer expiry reminder	Close the loop on the welcome code

Exit condition: Placed Order zero times since starting this flow. Buyers move to the post-purchase drip instead.

Split: After email 3, branch on whether they clicked a specific goal category, and route the best-seller email to match.

Example 2: Skincare post-purchase education drip (4 emails)

Send	Email	Job
On delivery	How to use it	Application order, amount, what to expect in week one
Delivery + 7 days	”What’s normal”	Pre-empt the purge or adjustment period that drives returns
Delivery + 14 days	Review request	Ask while the result is visible
Delivery + 21 days	Routine builder	Cross-sell the next step in the routine

This drip reduces returns and support tickets as much as it drives revenue, which is revenue in its own right.

Example 3: First-to-second purchase drip (3 emails)

The single most valuable drip for most DTC brands, because the jump from one order to two is where lifetime value starts to compound.

• Day 10 after delivery: Product tips plus one complementary product, chosen by what they bought.
• Day 21: Social proof from repeat customers (“what people buy next”).
• Day 35: A second-order incentive, only for those who have not reordered, and only if your margin supports it.

Filter: Placed Order equals 1 over all time, so repeat customers never see “your second order” messaging.

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How many emails should be in a drip campaign?

Three to five for most ecommerce drips. The honest answer is “as many as keep adding incremental revenue per recipient”, and that differs by flow:

• Abandonment drips (cart, checkout, browse): 2–3. Intent decays within hours; a fourth email mostly adds unsubscribes.
• Welcome series: 4–6. You are introducing a brand, and new subscribers are the most engaged people on your list.
• Post-purchase: 3–5, spread across the usage period.
• Win-back and sunset: 2–3. These audiences are cold; more volume does not warm them.

The practical test: add one email, run it for a month, and compare revenue per recipient for the whole flow against the shorter version. If the extra email only moves revenue from email 3 to email 4, it is not adding anything.

How long should a drip campaign be?

Length follows the buying decision, not a template. Cart drips run 24–72 hours. Welcome drips run 7–14 days. Replenishment drips run as long as the product lasts: a 30-serving tub means a first reminder around day 24–27, not day 14. Long drips are fine as long as every email has a distinct job.

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How to start a drip campaign in Klaviyo

1. Pick one goal. “Convert new subscribers to first order within 14 days” is a goal. “Engage subscribers” is not.
2. Choose the trigger. Go to Flows, create a flow (from scratch or Klaviyo’s library), and select the trigger type. Use a metric trigger for behaviour (orders, checkouts, views), a list trigger for signups, a segment trigger for states like “lapsed”.
3. Add trigger filters to limit entry, for example only orders containing a certain collection.
4. Build the sequence. Email, time delay, email. Keep the first version simple.
5. Add exit logic as profile filters. At minimum, exclude people who purchase during the flow (for pre-purchase drips) or who already reordered (for replenishment).
6. Add splits once the base works. First-time vs repeat buyer, country, product category, engaged vs not.
7. Decide on Smart Sending. Klaviyo’s Smart Sending skips people who received a message recently. Leave it on for most marketing drips; consider turning it off for time-critical or low-volume flows where the message must go out.
8. Preview with real profiles, check dynamic product blocks render, then set each message to live.
9. Review after 30 days on revenue per recipient and placed-order rate by email, not open rate. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens.

If you want the whole set built and engineered rather than switched on from templates, that is exactly what our flow automation service does.

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Drip campaign best practices for ecommerce

• One goal and one call to action per email. A drip email that tries to sell, educate and collect a review at once does none of them well.
• Tie the trigger to real intent. “Viewed Product twice in 24 hours” beats “Viewed Product once” for browse abandonment on a high-traffic store.
• Personalise beyond the first name. Product, category, order count and location are more useful than “Hi Sarah”.
• Stagger email and SMS. SMS for the highest-intent moment, email for the rest. See our email and SMS strategy.
• Protect deliverability. Drips send to more cold contacts than you think. Suppressing long-term unengaged profiles keeps the drips that matter in the inbox.
• Do not bake discounts into every drip. A discount in every flow teaches customers to wait for one. Reserve incentives for moments where the data says they change behaviour.
• Audit quarterly. Products change, offers expire, links break. A drip set live in 2024 and never touched is usually quietly underperforming.

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What is the best software for email drip campaigns?

It depends on how much store data the drip needs.

• Klaviyo: the default for ecommerce, because flows can trigger and branch on orders, product views, cart contents, catalogue data and predictive properties such as expected date of next order. Deep Shopify integration.
• Drip: a solid ecommerce-focused option with a clean builder; less depth on segmentation and predictive data. We compare them in Klaviyo vs Drip.
• Omnisend: good for smaller stores wanting email and SMS drips with pre-built workflows. See Klaviyo vs Omnisend.
• Mailchimp: fine for simple drips; ecommerce logic is shallower. See Klaviyo vs Mailchimp.
• ActiveCampaign: strong automation and CRM, better suited to brands with a sales-assisted or B2B side.

If you run a Shopify store doing meaningful volume, the drips that make money (post-purchase, replenishment, cross-sell) need purchase and product data. That is where Klaviyo earns its fee.

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Common drip campaign mistakes

• No purchase exit. One of the most common faults we see in audits: buyers receiving “still thinking about it?” emails after they have bought.
• Timing copied from a template. Default delays ignore your delivery times, product lifespan and buying cycle.
• Every drip ends in a discount. Margin leaks and customers learn the pattern.
• Overlapping drips. A new buyer in the welcome drip, post-purchase drip and a campaign on the same day. Use filters and Smart Sending to set priorities.
• Measuring opens. Measure placed-order rate and revenue per recipient per email.

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Put your drips to work

A drip campaign is simple in principle: a trigger, a sequence, a schedule. The revenue sits in the details: the exit logic, the timing matched to your product, the splits that turn a generic sequence into one that responds to the customer. Every ecommerce brand needs the set in the table above; very few have all of them engineered properly.

If you want to know which of your drips are underperforming and what that costs, our free Klaviyo audit maps every flow in your account against what the data supports, with a written plan to close the gap, whether you work with us or not.

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Sources

• Klaviyo Help Center: Understanding flow triggers and filters
• Klaviyo Help Center: Understanding Klaviyo’s predictive analytics